Mistress of the Bulge
When The Scottish Prisoner was published, a bookseller friend turned to me in delight and said, ‘I think you’ve invented a new literary form – the bulge!’ In other words, a story that is neither sequel nor prequel, but lives inside an existing body of work. Now, frankly, I wish she had thought of something more poetic to describe my efforts, but I have to admit that ‘bulge’ has a bit more punch – with its vivid imagery of a snake that’s swallowed some large and squirming prey – than colourless terms like ‘interpolation’ or ‘inclusion’.
I first wrote a short story fifteen years ago, mostly to see whether I could write something shorter than 300,000 words. It was an interesting technical challenge, but ‘short’ is not what you’d call one of my great natural skills. Still, I found the experience interesting, and since then have written the occasional short (well . . . sort of; it’s all relative, isn’t it?) piece when invited to contribute to an anthology now and then.
Even though these stories are relatively brief, they’re almost all connected to (and integral parts of) the large series of novels that includes both the huge Outlander novels and the smaller historical mysteries focused on the character of Lord John Grey. These novellas too are bulges; stories that fill a lacuna in the main story or explore the life and times of secondary characters, while connecting with the existing parts of the series.
Now, an anthology is a collection of stories written by a number of different authors. It’s a good way to sample the styles and voices of writers you might not usually encounter, or try an unfamiliar genre. Still, some readers may be chiefly interested in a particular favourite writer, and not want to buy an anthology for the sake of just one short story or novella.1
A few years ago, I collected three novellas about Lord John Grey (two of them previously published in anthologies, one written specifically for the new collection) into a single volume, and titled it Lord John and the Hand of Devils. Readers enjoyed having these pieces of Lord John’s story conveniently to hand, and so I figured that whenever I had a few more short pieces, I’d publish another collection. This is it.
This volume includes two Lord John novellas: The Custom of the Army, and Lord John and the Plague of Zombies. In terms of the overall chronology of the novels and shorter pieces involving his lordship, Custom follows the novel Brotherhood of the Blade and precedes the novel The Scottish Prisoner. Zombies follows The Scottish Prisoner (though it was in fact written while I was writing Prisoner, and was published before the novel was finished, and if you don’t think that was a swift bit of juggling . . .). You’ll find an overall chronology of both the main Outlander novels and the Lord John novels and novellas at the back of this book.
The Custom of the Army is set in 1759, in London and Quebec, and while it probably was all the fault of the electric eel, Lord John finds himself obliged to leave London for the wilds of Canada and the dangerous proximity of James Wolfe, the British general besieging the Citadel of Quebec. (‘Melodramatic ass,’ was what Hal had said, hastily briefing him before his departure. ‘Showy, bad judgement, terrible strategist. Has the Devil’s own luck, though, I’ll give him that. Don’t follow him into anything stupid.’)
Plague of Zombies takes place in 1761, on the island of Jamaica, where Lord John is sent as commander of a battalion intended to suppress what seems to be a revolt of the escaped slaves called maroons. But things are not always what they seem. (He rubbed the rest of the blood from his hand with the hem of his banyan, and the cold horror of the last few minutes faded into a glowing coal of anger, hot in the pit of his stomach. He’d been a soldier most of his life; he’d killed. He’d seen the dead on battlefields. And one thing he knew for a fact. Dead men don’t bleed.)
Now, you’ll also find two other stories in this book: A Leaf on the Wind of All Hallows, and The Space Between. Leaf is the story of Roger MacKenzie’s parents, Jerry and Dolly, and takes place during WWII. (It was cold in the room, and she hugged herself. She was wearing nothing but Jerry’s string vest – he thought she looked erotic in it – ‘lewd,’ he said, approving, his Highland accent making the word sound really dirty – and the thought made her smile. The thin cotton clung to her breasts, true enough, and her nipples poked out something scandalous, if only from the chill. She wanted to go crawl in next to him, longing for his warmth, longing to keep touching him for as long as they had.)
The Space Between follows the events in the novel An Echo in the Bone, is set in Paris in 1778, and concerns Michael Murray (Young Ian Murray’s elder brother), Joan MacKimmie (Marsali MacKimmie Fraser’s younger sister), Master Raymond, Mother Hildegarde (yes, she’s still alive), the Comte St Germain (ditto – surely you didn’t think he was really dead, did you?), and a number of other interesting people. (‘What a waste of a wonderful arse,’ Monsieur Brechin remarked in French, watching Joan’s ascent from the far side of the cabin. ‘And mon Dieu, those legs! Imagine those wrapped around your back, eh? Would you have her keep the striped stockings on? I would.’ It hadn’t occurred to Michael to imagine that, but he was now having a hard time dismissing the image. He coughed into his handkerchief to hide the reddening of his face.)
I hope you’ll enjoy the journey into so-far-uncharted territory, torches held aloft!
Diana Gabaldon
A Leaf on the Wind of All Hallows
Introduction to
A Leaf on the Wind of All Hallows
One of the interesting things you can do with a ‘bulge’ is to follow mysteries, hints, and loose ends from the main books of the series. One such trail follows the story of Roger MacKenzie’s parents.
In Outlander, we learn that Roger was orphaned during World War II, and then adopted by his great-uncle, the Reverend Reginald Wakefield, who tells Claire and Frank that Roger’s mother was killed in the Blitz, and that his father was a Spitfire pilot ‘shot down over the Channel’.
In Drums of Autumn, Roger tells Brianna the moving story of his mother’s death in the collapse of a Tube station during the bombing of London.
But in An Echo in the Bone, there is a poignant conversation in the moonlight between Claire and Roger, during which we encounter this little zinger:
Her hands wrapped his, small and hard and smelling of medicine.
‘I don’t know what happened to your father,’ she said. ‘But it wasn’t what they told you [. . .]
‘Of course things happen,’ she said, as though able to read his thoughts. ‘Accounts get garbled, too, over time and distance. Whoever told your mother might have been mistaken; she might have said something that the reverend misconstrued. All those things are possible. But during the War, I had letters from Frank – he wrote as often as he could, up until they recruited him into MI6. After that, I often wouldn’t hear anything for months. But just before that, he wrote to me, and mentioned – just as casual chat, you know – that he’d run into something strange in the reports he was handling. A Spitfire had gone down, crashed – not shot down; they thought it must have been an engine failure – in Northumbria, and while it hadn’t burned, for a wonder, there was no sign of the pilot. None. And he did mention the name of the pilot, because he thought Jeremiah rather an appropriately doomed sort of name.’
‘Jerry,’ Roger said, his lips feeling numb. ‘My mother always called him Jerry.’
‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘And there are circles of standing stones scattered all over Northumbria.’
So what really happened to Jerry MacKenzie and his wife Dolly? Read on.